`Where Love and Need are One'

With no interruption in service, Frank Wilson, newly retired but hardly retiring book review editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer, has entered his professional afterlife, at least the blogging portion of it, with Books Inq.: The Epilogue. We can’t say welcome back because he never left, and this is good news for loyal readers. In a Monday post titled “Colleagues,” Frank writes:

“If you can manage [to] find a way of earning a living that you like, you've got a good chunk of the personal happiness issue resolved, and an absolutely essential factor in that is your colleagues.”

Robert Frost was an “isolato,” to borrow Melville’s coinage (Moby-Dick, Chapter XXVII: “They were nearly all Islanders in the Pequod, Isolatoes too, I call such, not acknowledging the common continent of men, but each Isolato living on a separate continent of his own.”) and probably never acknowledged the existence of “colleagues,” but I thought of Frost when I read Frank’s characteristically generous sentence. Specifically, I remembered the final stanza of “Two Tramps in Mud Time”:

“But yield who will to their separation,
My object in living is to unite
My avocation and my vocation
As my two eyes make one in sight.
Only where love and need are one,
And the work is play for mortal stakes,
Is the deed ever really done
For Heaven and the future’s sakes.”

Frank appears to be one of those rare people for whom “love and need are one.” I, too, have known this state, but fleetingly, and I’m grateful for that much. To find the best words and arrange them in the best order, without surplus or deficit, is to “play for mortal stakes.”